Shakespeare on stage

Francis Bacon and the scientific method

Francis Bacon at his desk. From Shakespeare's
England.

"I have taken all knowledge to be my province" (from a letter
to Lord
Burleigh, 1592). Bacon's ambition was not
merely to master all knowledge, but to reform it, especially
the way by which new knowledge was to be acquired.

The method was to be inductive and experimental,
amassing data on important subjects, classifying them, and
developing from them wider rules and hypotheses. Like
Paracelsus, Bacon rejected
the old Aristotelian learning still taught in the
Universities, and proposed
a new method, a new logic, in his Novum Organum.

Bacon was not himself a distinguished scientist, though he
dabbled in experiment; his importance is in the way he
articulated what was to become the dominant mode of thought.

Discovering truth

Bacon eloquently argued that deductive reasoning should be
replaced by inductive (scientific) reasoning:

There are and can be only two ways of searching into and
discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and
particulars to the most general axioms, and from these
principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and
immovable, proceeds to judgment and middle axioms. And this
way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the
senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken
ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last
of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried.
(The New Organon, aphorism 19)

Footnotes

A scientific Utopia

The New Atlantis is a fictional work, describing an
ideal society where knowledge is pursued in the way Bacon
espoused as ideal. The most important part of the utopia he
describes is Salomon's House, where all natural phenomena are
examined and categorized. One of the Fathers of the house
explains: "The end of our Foundation is the knowledge of
causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the
bounds of Human Empire, to the effecting of all things
possible."

The creation of the Royal Society in 1660 was in significant
measure the result of Bacon's writings.